Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  Turning to the musical scholar I say this. You teach me how bass and treble harmonize, or how strings producing different notes can give rise to concord. I would rather you brought about some harmony in my mind and got my thoughts into tune. You show me which are the plaintive keys. I would rather you showed me how to avoid uttering plaintive notes when things go against me in life.

  The geometrician teaches me how to work out the size of my estates – rather than how to work out how much a man needs in order to have enough. He teaches me to calculate, putting my fingers into the service of avarice, instead of teaching me that there is no point whatsoever in that sort of computation and that a person is none the happier for having properties which tire accountants out, or to put it another way, how superfluous a man’s possessions are when he would be a picture of misery if you forced him to start counting up single-handed how much he possessed. What use is it to me to be able to divide a piece of land into equal areas if I’m unable to divide it with a brother? What use is the ability to measure out a portion of an acre with an accuracy extending even to the bits which elude the measuring rod if I’m upset when some high-handed neighbour encroaches slightly on my property? The geometrician teaches me how I may avoid losing any fraction of my estates, but what I really want to learn is how to lose the lot and still keep smiling. ‘But I’m being turned off the land my father and grandfather owned before me! ‘Well, so what? Who owned the land before your grandfather? Are you in a position to identify the community, let alone the individual, to whom it originally belonged? You entered on it as a tenant, not an absolute owner. Whose tenant, you may ask? Your heir’s, and that only if you’re lucky. The legal experts say that acquisition by prescription never applies where the property concerned is actually public property. Well, what you possess and call your own is really public property, or mankind’s property for that matter. Oh, the marvels of geometry! You geometers can calculate the areas of circles, can reduce any given shape to a square, can state the distances separating stars. Nothing’s outside your scope when it comes to measurement. Well, if you’re such an expert, measure a man’s soul; tell me how large or how small that is. You can define a straight line; what use is that to you if you’ve no idea what straightness means in life?

  I come now to the person who prides himself on his familiarity with the heavenly bodies:

  Towards which quarter chilly Saturn draws,

  The orbits in which burning Mercury roams.*

  What is to be gained from this sort of knowledge? Am I supposed to feel anxious when Saturn and Mars are in opposition or Mercury sets in the evening in full view of Saturn, instead of coming to learn that bodies like these are equally propitious wherever they are, and incapable of change in any case. They are swept on in a path from which they cannot escape, their motion governed by an uninterrupted sequence of destined events, making their reappearances in cycles that are fixed. They either actuate or signalize all that comes about in the universe. If every event is brought about by them, how is mere familiarity with a process which is unchangeable going to be of any help? If they are pointers to events, what difference does it make to be aware in advance of things you cannot escape? They are going to happen whether you know about them or not.

  If you observe the hasting sun and watch

  The stars processing through the skies, the day

  That follows will not prove you wrong; nor will

  Deceptive cloudfree nights then take you in.*

  I’ve taken sufficient precautions, more than sufficient precautions, to ensure that I’m not taken in by deceptive phenomena. At this you’ll protest: ‘Can you really say “the day that follows never proves me wrong”? Surely anything that happens which one didn’t know in advance was going to happen proves one wrong?’ Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen; but I do know what’s capable of happening – and none of this will give rise to any protest on my part. I’m ready for everything. If I’m let off in any way, I’m pleased. The day in question proves me wrong in a sense if it treats me leniently, but even so not really wrong, for just as I know that anything is capable of happening so also do I know that it’s not bound to happen. So I look for the best and am prepared for the opposite.

  You’ll have to bear with me if I digress here. Nothing will induce me to accept painters into the list of liberal arts, any more than sculptors, marble-masons and all the other attendants on extravagance. I must equally reject those oil and dust practitioners, the wrestlers, or else I shall have to include in the list the perfumers and cooks and all the others who place their talents at the service of our pleasures. What is there, I ask you, that’s liberal about those characters who vomit up their food to empty their stomachs for more, with their bodies stuffed full and their minds all starved and inactive? Can we possibly look on this as a liberal accomplishment for the youth of Rome, whom our ancestors trained to stand up straight and throw a javelin, to toss the caber, and manage a horse, and handle weapons? They never used to teach their children anything which could be learned in a reclining posture. That kind of training, nevertheless, doesn’t teach or foster moral values any more than the other. What’s the use, after all, of mastering a horse and controlling him with the reins at full gallop if you’re carried away yourself by totally unbridled emotions? What’s the use of overcoming opponent after opponent in the wrestling or boxing rings if you can be overcome by your temper?

  ‘So we don’t,’ you may ask, ‘in fact gain anything from the liberal studies?’ As far as character is concerned, no, but we gain a good deal from them in other directions – just as even these admittedly inferior arts which we’ve been talking about, the ones that are based on use of the hands, make important contributions to the amenities of life although they have nothing to do with character. Why then do we give our sons a liberal education? Not because it can make them morally good but because it prepares the mind for the acquisition of moral values. Just as that grounding in grammar, as they called it in the old days, in which boys are given their elementary schooling, does not teach them the liberal arts but prepares the ground for knowledge of them in due course, so when it comes to character the liberal arts open the way to it rather than carry the personality all the way there….*

  In this connexion I feel prompted to take a look at individual qualities of character. Bravery is the one which treats with contempt things ordinarily inspiring fear, despising and defying and demolishing all the things that terrify us and set chains on human freedom. Is she in any way fortified by liberal studies? Take loyalty, the most sacred quality that can be found in a human breast, never corrupted by a bribe, never driven to betray by any form of compulsion, crying: ‘Beat me, burn me, put me to death, I shall not talk – the more the torture probes my secrets the deeper I’ll hide them! ‘Can liberal studies create that kind of spirit? Take self-control, the quality which takes command of the pleasures; some she dismisses out of hand, unable to tolerate them; others she merely regulates, ensuring that they are brought within healthy limits; never approaching pleasures for their own sake, she realizes that the ideal limit with things you desire is not the amount you would like to but the amount you ought to take. Humanity is the quality which stops one being arrogant towards one’s fellows, or being acrimonious. In words, in actions, in emotions she reveals herself as kind and good-natured towards all. To her the troubles of anyone else are her own, and anything that benefits herself she welcomes primarily because it will be of benefit to someone else. Do the liberal studies inculcate these attitudes? No, no more than they do simplicity, or modesty and restraint, or frugality and thrift, or mercy, the mercy that is as sparing with another’s blood as though it were its own, knowing that it is not for man to make wasteful use of man.

  Someone will ask me how I can say that liberal studies are of no help towards morality when I’ve just been saying that there’s no attaining morality without them. My answer would be this: there’s no attaining morality without food either, but there’s no co
nnexion between morality and food. The fact that a ship can’t begin to exist without the timbers of which it’s built doesn’t mean that the timbers are of ‘help’ to it. There’s no reason for you to assume that, X being something without which Y could never have come about, Y came about as a result of the assistance of X. And indeed it can actually be argued that the attainment of wisdom is perfectly possible without the liberal studies; although moral values are things which have to be learnt, they are not learnt through these studies. Besides, what grounds could I possibly have for supposing that a person who has no acquaintance with books will never be a wise man? For wisdom does not lie in books. Wisdom publishes not words but truths – and I’m not sure that the memory isn’t more reliable when it has no external aids to fall back on.

  There is nothing small or cramped about wisdom. It is something calling for a lot of room to move. There are questions to be answered concerning physical as well as human matters, questions about the past and about the future, questions about things eternal and things ephemeral, questions about time itself. On this one subject of time just look how many questions there are. To start with, does it have an existence of its own? Next, does anything exist prior to time, independently of it? Did it begin with the universe, or did it exist even before then on the grounds that there was something in existence before the universe? There are countless questions about the soul alone – where it comes from, what its nature is, when it begins to exist, and how long it is in existence; whether it passes from one place to another, moving house, so to speak, on transfer to successive living creatures, taking on a different form with each, or is no more than once in service and is then released to roam the universe; whether it is a corporeal substance or not; what it will do when it ceases to act through us, how it will employ its freedom once it has escaped its cage here; whether it will forget its past and become conscious of its real nature from the actual moment of its parting from the body and departure for its new home on high. Whatever the field of physical or moral sciences you deal with, you will be given no rest by the mass of things to be learnt or investigated. And to enable matters of this range and scale to find unrestricted hospitality in our minds, everything superfluous must be turned out. Virtue will not bring herself to enter the limited space we offer her; something of great size requires plenty of room. Let everything else be evicted, and your heart completely opened to her.

  ‘But it’s a nice thing, surely, to be familiar with a lot of subjects.’ Well, in that case let us retain just as much of them as we need. Would you consider a person open to criticism for putting superfluous objects on the same level as really useful ones by arranging on display in his house a whole array of costly articles, but not for cluttering himself up with a lot of superfluous furniture in the way of learning? To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance. Apart from which this kind of obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritating, tactless, self-satisfied bores, not learning what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need. The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand works: I should feel sorry for him if he had merely read so many useless works. In these works he discusses such questions as Homer’s origin, who was Aeneas’ real mother, whether Anacreon’s manner of life was more that of a lecher or that of a drunkard, whether Sappho slept with anyone who asked her, and other things that would be better unlearned if one actually knew them! Don’t you go and tell me now that life is long enough for this sort of thing! When you come to writers in our own school, for that matter, I’ll show you plenty of works which could do with some ruthless pruning. It costs a person an enormous amount of time (and other people’s ears an enormous amount of boredom) before he earns such compliments as ‘What a learned person!’ Let’s be content with the much less fashionable label, ‘What a good man!’…*

  What about thinking how much time you lose through constantly being taken up with official matters, private matters or ordinary everyday matters, through sleep, through ill health? Measure your life: it just does not have room for so much.

  I have been speaking about liberal studies. Yet look at the amount of useless and superfluous matter to be found in the philosophers. Even they have descended to the level of drawing distinctions between the uses of different syllables and discussing the proper meanings of prepositions and conjunctions. They have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies – with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives. Listen and let me show you the sorry consequences to which subtlety carried too far can lead, and what an enemy it is to truth. Protagoras declares that it is possible to argue either side of any question with equal force, even the question whether or not one can equally argue either side of any question! Nausiphanes declares that of the things which appear to us to exist, none exists any more than it does not exist. Parmenides declares that of all these phenomena none exists except the whole. Zeno of Elea has dismissed all such difficulties by introducing another; he declares that nothing exists. The Pyrrhonean, Megarian, Eretrian and Academic schools pursue more or less similar lines; the last named have introduced a new branch of knowledge, non-knowledge.

  Well, all these theories you should just toss on top of that heap of superfluous liberal studies. The people I first mentioned provide me with knowledge which is not going to be of any use to me, while the others snatch away from me any hopes of ever acquiring any knowledge at all. Superfluous knowledge would be preferable to no knowledge. One side offers me no guiding light to direct my vision towards the truth, while the other just gouges my eyes out. If I believe Protagoras there is nothing certain in the universe; if I believe Nausiphanes there is just the one certainty, that nothing is certain; if Parmenides, only one thing exists; if Zeno, not even one. Then what are we? The things that surround us, the things on which we live, what are they? Our whole universe is no more than a semblance of reality, perhaps a deceptive semblance, perhaps one without substance altogether. I should find it difficult to say which of these people annoy me most, those who would have us know nothing or the ones who refuse even to leave us the small satisfaction of knowing that we know nothing.

  LETTER XC

  WHO can doubt, my dear Lucilius, that life is the gift of the immortal gods, but that living well is the gift of philosophy? A corollary of this would be the certain conclusion that our debt to philosophy is greater than the debt we owe to the gods (by just so much as a good life is more of a blessing than, simply, life) had it not been for the fact that philosophy itself was something bestowed by the gods. They have given no one the present of a knowledge of philosophy, but everyone the means of acquiring it. For if they had made philosophy a blessing given to all and sundry, if we were born in a state of moral enlightenment, wisdom would have been deprived of the best thing about her – that she isn’t one of the things which fortune either gives us or doesn’t As things are, there is about wisdom a nobility and magnificence in the fact that she doesn’t just fall to a person’s lot, that each man owes her to his own efforts, that one doesn’t go to anyone other than oneself to find her. What would you have worth looking up to in philosophy if she were handed out free?