The Apolitical Baggage of Seneca

“What is most important in human life? Not filling the sea with fleets, nor setting up standards on the shore of the Red Sea, nor, when the earth runs out of sources of harm, wandering the ocean to seek the unknown; rather it is seeing everything with one’s mind, and conquering one’s faults, which is the greatest victory possible. There are countless people who have been in control of nations and cities, very few who have been in control of themselves.” (Seneca, Natural Questions, Preface to “On Terrestrial Waters”, 10)

Here we have a window into the Roman world that Seneca and Lucilius inhabit. Seneca paints a picture of a social and political order based on all the wrong reasons — the search for personal glory by raising armies and undertaking massive and risky military expeditions as the basis for personal glory and thus political power.

Seneca diagnoses a moral problem, but any potential political critique remains nascent at best. To be sure, Seneca is not in a position to offer a better political alternative. His world is fundamentally unpredictable — made up of discreet events (fortuita) that, on their face, have no apparent logic. Illness, loss of wealth, destruction of cities at the hand of a conqueror are all fundamental to the world Seneca presents to us. Resistance — collective or otherwise — is not part of the control that Seneca exhorts us to undertake. Resistance, in fact, is harmful to the Stoic individual, leading away from tranquility and joy.

Foucault summarizes life’s unpredictability nicely in his lecture on Natural Questions (24 February, 1982):

… the paraskeue [what Seneca translates as instructio] could be called both an open and an orientated preparation of the individual for the events of life. What I mean is this: In the ascesis, the paraskeue involves preparing the individual for the future, for a future of unforeseen events whose general nature may be familiar to us, but which we cannot know whether and when they will occur. It involves, then, finding in ascesis a preparation, a paraskeue, which can be adopted to what may occur, and only to this, and at the very moment it occurs, if it does so.

We may very well describe this as “coping,” and this is one of the tendencies of Stoicism. I don’t say that this is the tendency. Rather, it occurs when the world appears hopeless (for seeing “hope” as a weakness is part of the Stoic way of life). When this happens, it is easy to turn to oneself as consolation. At its worst, askesis becomes a smug contempt for the world and a withdrawal into oneself.

There is also no civil society here, no “Life World” (to use Habermas’ term) as the basis for legitimizing political power. Seneca’s world is, from our perspective, ungrounded and arbitrary in its accessing and use of power. Socrates at least had the semblance of a democracy, which gave his personal mission to teach others to “care for their souls” a reasonable claim to political affectivity. Seneca has, at best, a dysfunctional Senate. Social relations are held together by traditional hierarchies, plots, fickle loyalties, and, at best, the intricacies of gift exchange (On Benefits).

In such a world, coping may be the Stoic’s only recourse. But when it is dressed up as “virtue”, “self control”, and “endurance” as the height of human achievement, we must be careful of what we inherit.

Freedom is putting one’s mind above injuries, making oneself into the sole source of one’s joys, and separating external things from oneself so that one does not have to live an unsettled life, afraid of everyone’s laughter and everyone’s tongue. (“On the Constancy of the Wise Person,” 19.2)

We are very far from a concept of “freedom” that is collective and protected by institutions legitimized by a civil society. “We the People” as a political phrase is not possible here.

Yet, we are close.

I cannot be free until I have had the opportunity to fulfill my total capacity untrammeled by any artificial hindrance or barrier.

Integration demands that we recognize that a denial of freedom is a denial of life itself. (Martin Luther King, Jr. “Ethical Demands of Integration”)

Freedom as the “fulfillment of capacities” is an echo of Seneca, but in the hands of King, we have something very different. If there is a connection between freedom and integration in Seneca, the connection is merely and completely individual — atomized and segregated. (The “second commonwealth” of the Stoics, which represents humanity beyond national borders, is only imaginatively possible.) King’s “integration” is thoroughly social, political, and economic while also being individual.

It is important for us to understand that this is the political baggage that Stoicism carries with it when translated to our own times as has become popular. Seneca’s political world is too corrupt and too out of control to fight against it and to re-establish it on better foundations. The Stoic may be able to see injustices, but s/he isn’t obligated to do anything about them. The Stoic easily becomes King’s “moderate liberals” from his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” The Stoic concept of patientia can easily become the detached call for patience on the part of so-called liberals toward the oppressed — the subject of King’s Why We Can’t Wait.

Seneca’s addressees in the dialogs are Stoic proficiens who are making their way in a Roman world full of vagaries, fragile loyalties and the constant threat of death. Getting by is the game without rising or falling too far. This form of Stoicism is fundamentally conservative. As Robert Kaster pointed out in his brilliant essay on Roman patientia:

… the problem of patientia condensed for the Romans the problem of living in a human society defined by hierarchy and differentials of power. It was a problem that could be solved only by appeal to truths thought to lie outside merely human relations: by Stoicism, in the purely personal autonomy of the wise who live according to Nature, or by Chritianity’s yielding of the self to an all-loving God. (“The Taxonomy of Patience, or When Is Patientia Not a Virtue?”)

The solution in a politically fraught and dangerous world is to look to care for oneself. In the hands of Plato’s Socrates, “caring for one’s soul” defined a new form of “service to the city” (Apology) — exhorting others to care for themselves so as to be better citizens, which makes sense when the city is ostensibly governed by a direct democracy of 500+ deliberating citizens. Here withdrawal from conventional political life makes sense in order to help others become better deliberators. In the hands of Seneca, this withdrawal into oneself can quickly err on the side of disengagement from the world even as one believes that this withdrawal is a moral action (“On Leisure” is probably the most coherent articulation of this.)

Freedom is thus an individual accomplishment for one surrounded by out-of-control events, not a political one.