Seneca, On the Shortness of Life — Ch. 6-10 #378

A read-along experience. Part 3

Dear friends and supporters of Daily Philosophy,

Here I am, a bit later than usual, with the next part of our Seneca read-along. My preferred mode of living (the same thing happening every day, with only different meals providing some welcome variation) is thoroughly upset right now, because we are preparing to leave for our summer holiday — in addition to having monsoons and rainstorms that cancelled the kids’ schools. And these are some of the reasons why I couldn’t send you this email earlier this week. For the coming few weeks, as we are travelling, you may also experience other irregularities and small delays having to do with the spotty Internet on Greek beaches, with jet-lag and work scheduling that has been upset by time-zone shifts. So please be patient if things seem to fall apart a bit in the coming weeks. If everything goes as planned, the world will return to its usual order by September, when my new teaching term will begin. By the way, next term I’ll be teaching, among other things, an introduction to Python programming for the Humanities. If you are interested in that, I am uploading the lecture videos for that already, and you can find them on YouTube and here on Substack:

And with this I wish you all a great summer, and let’s now return to our Seneca!

Plan for next week

• By Wednesday, July 16: Read chapters 11-15

• Chat for discussions on the book: https://dailyphilosophy.substack.com/chat

• The text: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_shortness_of_life

Created by Substack’s AI

Recap of Chapters 1-5

If your memory of the first five chapters is a bit hazy, here’s what happened:

• In Chapter 1, Seneca introduces the main idea of the book: “It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.”

• In Chapter 2, Seneca looks at the various ways in which we waste our lives: sloth, wine, too much greed and ambition, complaining, being busy, lacking fixed principles for our lives. Seneca here shows some disdain of the flesh: chasing material goods, lust, pleasures and worldly gain is going to keep us unhappy and is not a good use of our time.

• In Chapter 3, Seneca gives us a first glimpse of his positive conception of the good life. Until now, he was only telling us what not to do. But how ought we to live? According to Seneca, we should have a fixed plan for our lives, a plan that follows rational principles. We will see today what this means.

• In Chapter 4, Seneca talks of leisure. Not that being inactive is a good thing, but he points out that even those human beings who ought to be most satisfied with their lives (like the god-like emperor Augustus), are in reality unhappy. Amid all the success in their lives, and despite all their fame, riches and power, they wish for nothing more than to rest and to lead a quiet, contemplative life.

• Finally, in Chapter 5, Seneca presents us with the case of Cicero, another famous and powerful Roman, who, despite his great influence, felt himself to be “half a prisoner,” because his life was not in his own control. The only way to true freedom, Seneca writes, is to be “above Fortune”: “For what can possibly be above him who is above Fortune?”

Chapter 6

So now we come to the next five chapters. In Chapter 6, Seneca uses the example of politician and legal expert Livius Drusus, who already as a boy was involved in legal cases, giving advice right and left, while never having a day of rest. Seneca wants to make the point that we should not wait until the end of life, until our retirement, to change our ways. Because Livius Drusus died unexpectedly and violently (there is some dispute over the exact cause of his death, which could have been a crime or suicide), and never got to experience the sweet fruits of retirement. One never knows how much time one has left, Seneca seems to be saying. And just complaining about one’s life is not equal to changing it:

It would be superfluous to mention more who, though others deemed them the happiest of men, have expressed their loathing for every act of their years, and with their own lips have given true testimony against themselves; but by these complaints they changed neither themselves nor others. For when they have vented their feelings in words, they fall back into their usual round. Heaven knows! such lives as yours, though they should pass the limit of a thousand years, will shrink into the merest span; your vices will swallow up any amount of time.

Many talk about how much they loathe the way they live, but few have the courage and the determination to change it. Most, having complained loudly, go back to their unchanged lives the next morning. And vices, by which Seneca seems to mean any worthless activity that takes up one’s time, will “swallow up any amount of time.” So we should not just wish for more time, like many do, because a mere extension of life will not have any effect — we will just waste the additional time as we wasted the first measure of time that we were given. Only a change in the way that we behave can really turn our lives around. Not more time, but a better use of it.

You can see what he is doing here: he gives us the initiative and the power to change our lives back. Because the length of our life is out of our control, but the use we make of it is not. And the whole point of Stoic ethics is to take control of these factors that we can control and try to make the best of them, while, at the same time, avoiding granting too much influence to those factors that are outside of our control.

Chapter 7 — “Liberal Studies”

In Chapter 7, Seneca again talks of all the ways in which we squander our lives. Not only the usual suspects, wine and lust, but also “liberal studies,” and, presumably, philosophy newsletters like this one:

Since the mind, when its interests are divided, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it.

Now, I find this very intriguing (and confusing). Because, as we saw last week, Physics, Ethics and Logic are the Stoic sciences, and these are considered essential for the project of Stoicism. If the wise man, the Stoic sage, wants to exercise control where he can, he will need to know as much as possible about the world. This knowledge will be the very basis of his ability to understand and, therefore, control the world. But now Seneca seems to be contradicting this. Should we focus on a narrow field of study, say, entomology or quantum physics, and ignore all the knowledge that “liberal studies” could give us about the world? And isn’t Ethics and Logic part of liberal studies anyway?

To understand what Seneca wants, we should first see what “liberal studies” encompasses for him. Helpfully, in his Letter to Lucilius number 88, Seneca has a whole essay “On Liberal and Vocational Studies.” He writes:

1 You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies. My answer is this: I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making. Such studies are profit-bringing occupations, useful only in so far as they give the mind a preparation and do not engage it permanently. One should linger upon them only so long as the mind can occupy itself with nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our real work. 2. Hence you see why "liberal studies" are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman. But there is only one really liberal study, – that which gives a man his liberty. It is the study of wisdom, and that is lofty, brave, and great-souled. All other studies are puny and puerile. You surely do not believe that there is good in any of the subjects whose teachers are, as you see, men of the most ignoble and base stamp? We ought not to be learning such things; we should have done with learning them.

Looking at your average philosophy department, one can understand Seneca’s reservations. But it’s not that physics, ethics and logic are useless. It is rather about the way in which they should be studied, and about the intended result of such studies:

26 Moreover, each has its own limits; for the wise man investigates and learns the causes of natural phenomena, while the mathematician follows up and computes their numbers and their measurements. ... The wise man knows the laws by which the heavenly bodies persist, what powers belong to them, and what attributes; the astronomer merely notes their comings and goings, the rules which govern their settings and their risings, and the occasional periods during which they seem to stand still, although as a matter of fact no heavenly body can stand still. 27. The wise man will know what causes the reflection in a mirror; but, the mathematician can merely tell you how far the body should be from the reflection, and what shape of mirror will produce a given reflection. The philosopher will demonstrate that the sun is a large body, while the astronomer will compute just how large...

So Seneca is not saying that we should ignore the sciences. It is crucial for the philosopher to learn about nature, about physics, mathematics, astronomy, and presumably every other science. But, as opposed to the worker in the sciences, who focuses on measurements and observations, who collects and compares data, the philosopher uses the data to get true insight into the workings of nature. The astronomer merely records the appearances of the heavenly bodies. It is the philosopher who understands why the stars do what they do, and who can put this understanding in the service of virtue and the good life.

There is but one thing that brings the soul to perfection — the unalterable knowledge of good and evil. But there is no other art [except philosophy] which investigates good and evil.

So when Seneca tells us to abstain from “liberal studies,” he means that we should not collect data, make observations and measurements for the sake of these activities themselves. Neither should we focus on merely describing nature, while at the same time ignoring the real question: how can I utilise my knowledge of nature to aid my progress towards a virtuous and free, truly philosophical life? Liberal studies have their place, just as food has its place in the life of a sage. Even the greatest philosopher has to eat in order to survive. This does not mean that they should focus and limit their research to the culinary arts:

31 "But," one says, "since you declare that virtue cannot be attained without the 'liberal studies,' how is it that you deny that they offer any assistance to virtue?" Because you cannot attain virtue without food, either; and yet food has nothing to do with virtue.

Liberal studies, and the sciences, may be necessary conditions for virtue — but they are not virtue itself, nor can they teach us about it.

The chapter ends with Seneca again emphasising that killing time with mindless activity does not equal life:

Everyone hurries his life on and suffers from a yearning for the future and a weariness of the present. But 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. For what new pleasure is there that any hour can now bring? They are all known, all have been enjoyed to the full. Mistress Fortune may deal out the rest as she likes; his life has already found safety.

The Stoic sage has already everything they need, any time. They are not chasing something more, or something new. They enjoy every moment “to the full,” and therefore there is nothing that they still lack, nothing that they wish for. And in this sense, the Stoic sage is ready to die at every moment.

If life was a voyage, the sage would be seen progressing towards their goal, while the common man would be endlessly going in circles:

For what if you should think that that man had had a long voyage who had been caught by a fierce storm as soon as he left harbour, and, swept hither and thither by a succession of winds that raged from different quarters, had been driven in a circle around the same course? Not much voyaging did he have, but much tossing about.

The Stoic purpose of life

There is more here than one can immediately see. In The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, Dorothea Frede gives a great analysis of Stoic determinism. And one important element of it is the Stoic belief in an ordered universe. Much like Aristotle’s telos, the Stoics also believed that there is an inherent goal or purpose to the universe; and all creatures and all things, each in its own way, strive to fulfil this telos, to bring about this end.

But there is an important difference to Aristotle. For him, the telos is the purpose of each one, separate thing (the purpose of a spoon is to help us eat soup; the purpose of a knife is to cut things; and so on). For the Stoics, there is, beyond these small purposes, a kind of grand purpose of the universe as a whole, and all these smaller purposes are orchestrated by the great mind of the universe, the pneuma, in such a way as to cooperate harmoniously in order to bring about the optimal functioning of creation, to manifest the grand telos of the world. This (almost religious) belief has a few interesting consequences:

First, nothing is isolated. All things and all actions, all humans, animals, plants and rocks are part of a grand scheme and have to play their part in it. This becomes the basis for the Stoic sense of kinship with all things, the sense that we are all part of something bigger than ourselves. This feeling is true, because we are.

Second, since the universe is striving towards a state of flourishing or fulfilment, this world is, to say it with the words of a much later thinker, the best of all possible worlds. There may be small variations in the way things play out, but the grand plan of the universe is what it is, and cannot be changed. This gives us the Stoic belief in determinism, as well as an explanation why things will repeat again and again: because the Stoics believed also in a cyclical time, a history that will repeat endless times, again and again, in essentially the same way. And why will it do that? Because every time it will strive to bring about the grand telos, and since the components of the universe are the same, its optimal, final configuration will also be the same, and so, going backwards from there, every step that brings us closer to that end state will also be roughly the same. Stoic history is not so different from Groundhog Day: an endless repetition of the steps that are required to bring about the one, optimal end state of the world. When this has been achieved, the universe will restart its cycle once more.

We will see in the next part how this all works together to give some kind of solution to the greatest problem of Stoic metaphysics: the clash between determinism and human freedom.

Let’s now end this newsletter here, because it is becoming too long (and I still have to pack). I know that we’re not through with this week’s chapters, but that’s life. If Seneca takes a week longer to read, so be it. I will see you next time from a Greek beach, and until then, I want to leave you with one last sentence from chapter 7 of Seneca’s book.

For me, this is one of the most beautiful sentences of the whole work:

It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and — what will perhaps make you wonder more — it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.

Have a great weekend!